Conversion tables

One of the Domesday satellitetexts - the Yorkshire Summary- suggests that Inquest officials may have prepared conversion tables to enable them to switch between geographically and feudallyorganised formats for the material they gathered in each county. The Summary itself is organised geographically, by Wapentakeand vill. But the name of the tenant-in-chiefis interlined above each holdingin
red. This emphasis (see the Facsimile) makes it a simple clerical task
to list the holdings under the name of each tenant-in-chief, thus
converting the geographical arrangement of the data into a feudal one.

Surprisingly, the suggestion that conversion tables may have been one of
the bureaucratic tools which made the Domesday Inquest so speedy and so
efficient has received little attention. If accepted - and it is very
plausible - then much of the debate about the 'making of Domesday Book'
over the past century has been beside the point. For that debate has
centred upon the view - accepted by most scholars - that 'if we knew how
Domesday was made, we should know why it was made'. But if the Domesday
material could be re-structured with ease, the hypothesis is unfounded.